But as the ill-feeling became more violent, she met with the same story again and again, and often with new and worse versions in forms she could not combat. She began to be haunted by vague memories of things she had not comprehended. A sense of pain followed her. She was afraid, at times, to go to the cottages, lest she should be confronted with something which would overwhelm her. Then she began to search her son's face with a sense of finding some strangeness in it. She watched him wistfully when he had so far forgotten her presence as to be almost unaware of it. One night, having thrown himself upon a sofa and fallen into a weary sleep, he suddenly started up from it to find her standing close by him, looking down, her face pale, her locked fingers moving nervously. "What is it?" he exclaimed. "What ails you?" He was startled by her falling upon her knees at his side, crying, and laying her shaking hand upon his shoulder. "You was having a bad dream, my dear," she said,--"a bad dream. I--I scarcely knowed your face, Jem--it was so altered." He sank back upon his cushions and stared at her. He knew he had been having no bad dream. His dreams were not half so evil and bitter when he slept as they were in these days when he wakened. "You always had such a good face, Jem," she said, "and such a kind one. When you was a boy----" He stopped her almost sullenly. "I'm not a boy now," he said. "That's put away and done with." "No," she answered, "that's true, my dear; but you've lived an innocent life, an'--an' never done no wrong--no more than you did when you was one. And your face was so altered." Her voice died away into a silence which, somehow, neither of them could break. It was Granny Dixon who revealed the truth in its barest form. Perhaps no man nor woman in Broxton knew more of it than this respectable ancient matron. Haworth and his iniquities had been the spice of her later life. The fact that his name was being mentioned in a conversation never escaped her; she discovered it as if by magic and invariably commanded that the incident under discussion be repeated at the top of the reciter's voice for her benefit, occasionally somewhat to the confusion of the honest matron in question. How it had happened that she had not betrayed all to Mrs. Haworth at once was a mystery to remain unsolved. During the little woman's visits to the cottage, Mrs. Briarley existed in a chronic condition of fear and trembling. "She'll be out wi' it some o' these days, mark me," she would quaver to Janey. "An' th' Lord knows, I would na' be theer fur nowt when she does." But she did not do it at first. Mrs. Briarley had a secret conviction that the fact that she did not do so was due entirely to iniquity. She had seen her sit peering from under her brows at their guest as the simple creature poured forth her loving praise of her son, and at such times it was always Mrs. Briarley's province to repeat the conversation for her benefit.